Category: publishing

Apparently, it’s not enough to have produced the best-selling children’s book series of all time. The good folks at Scholastic, American publisher of the Harry Potter books, are launching a new ad campaign designed to draw adults of all demographics into the Hogwartian fold. A new series of print ads aimed at the 18-35 set, and specifically focusing on such voracious consumers of literature as bikers and skate punks, will begin running in select magazines this fall.

“Spain’s top-selling novelist, Arturo Perez-Reverte, was called before a judge yesterday to answer allegations of plagiarism in a battle with a fellow Spanish novelist over the script of the film Gypsy.”

Madonna’s first literary effort – a children’s book – has become the fastest selling children’s picture book of all time.

Hillary Clinton’s memoir is making a huge splash in China, where a translated version of the book is topping bestseller lists. But New York’s junior senator is furious with Chinese authorities for censoring the book, removing all passages critical of the Chinese government before releasing it for domestic consumption.

When newspapers review a book before it’s actually been published, it lets the air out of publication. “Early reviewing means that books don’t get a fair shake. Why, I asked a friend at Viking, don’t they act against editors who infringe the embargo notice? Why not sue, or collectively boycott, offending journals – either directly or through the Publishers’ Association? The fact is that publishers are frightened of editors. So are authors.”

“Having conquered the children’s market, Scholastic Inc., the U.S. publisher of J.K. Rowling’s multimillion-selling series, is targeting adults, ages 18 to 35. Potter ads featuring bikers, skateboarders and couch potatoes will appear in Rolling Stone and other magazines throughout October. ‘We felt we needed to think out of the box and reach out to readers who would not normally pick up a copy of Harry Potter unless somebody placed it in their hands’.”

The new Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary is out, and it includes 10,000 new words. But there were many words that had to be taken out to make room. “Among these ghost words, the most unjustly cashiered may well be “snollygoster.” A snollygoster is . . . a snollygoster is . . . actually, without a previous edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary handy, there’s no telling anymore what a snollygoster is. Luckily — and here’s a phrase that must give every last lexicographer at Merriam-Webster the fantods – – that’s what Google’s for.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti says the Beat poets have been over-romanticized. “It is really much more interesting today than in the 50’s. There has been all of this mythologizing of the 50’s and the Beat generation in San Francisco and so forth, but it has been wildly overdone, because it was a really depressing period, I thought, on account of the general repressive atmosphere and the political climate. Mr. Ferlinghetti described the Beats in San Francisco as ‘New York carpetbaggers’ who were fixated on an America that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Thirty years after Hitler wrote his last and largely unknown book, it was discovered by Jewish scholar Gerhard Weinberg – who has spent four decades trying to publish it in English.”

Book columnist J. Peder Zane writes an open letter to Stephen King about his pending National Book Award. “I am writing to ask you to do something that only one in a million in your position would even contemplate. I am beseeching you to perform a truly heroic act that could influence the direction of American culture. Respectfully, I am urging you to decline this award.”